The story
As you stand here on the windswept slopes of Arthur’s Seat, you are standing on the dormant heart of an ancient volcano. This rugged landscape, rising nearly eight hundred feet above the spires of Edinburgh, has served as a silent witness to the city’s long and often dark evolution. From this vantage point, the city below looks like a model, a sprawling map of stone and history.
But some of the most unsettling history of this park wasn’t found in the archives of the palace below, but hidden right here, tucked into the very rock beneath your feet. In late June of 1836, three local boys were scrambling over the north-eastern crags of this hill, hunting for rabbits. In a small, natural niche in the rock, concealed behind three thin slabs of slate, they discovered something that would baffle historians for nearly two centuries.
It was a cache of seventeen miniature coffins. Each tiny casket was only about three or four inches long, meticulously carved from pine and adorned with small pieces of tin. Inside each one lay a little wooden doll, custom-carved with distinct facial features and dressed in hand-sewn cotton garments.
The discovery immediately sparked a frenzy of speculation. Were they used in some forgotten ritual of Gaelic witchcraft? Were they charms meant to protect sailors at sea?
Or perhaps they were "fairy coffins," left as offerings to the spirits of the hill. However, a much darker theory began to emerge, one that tied these miniatures to the most notorious crime spree in Edinburgh’s history. Just eight years before the boys found the cache, the city had been paralyzed by the crimes of William Burke and William Hare.
These men did not rob graves; they turned to murder to satisfy the demand for fresh cadavers at the city’s prestigious medical schools. By the time they were caught, they had claimed seventeen victims. The coincidence was impossible to ignore.
The number of coffins found here—seventeen—matched the number of people murdered by Burke and Hare exactly. Some believe the dolls were a symbolic burial, an act of quiet, lonely penance performed by someone who knew the victims, or perhaps by a person burdened with the guilt of having watched the murders happen. Since the actual victims had been dissected on the anatomist’s table, their bodies lost to science, these effigies may have been a way to finally lay their spirits to rest in the soil of the hill.
Only eight of the original seventeen coffins survived the journey from the hillside to the present day, and they now rest in the National Museum of Scotland. But as you look out toward the Salisbury Crags or down at the ruins of St. Anthony’s Chapel, let the mystery linger.
This hill is a place of beauty, but it is also a place of deep, silent memory, where the secrets of the city are buried just out of sight.